Condensed Matter Theory Seminar: Tianci Zhou, MIT, “The entanglement membrane in chaotic many-body systems”

Event time: 
Thursday, October 28, 2021 - 1:00pm to 2:00pm
Location: 
Online () See map
Event description: 

We propose a new universality class for dynamical quantities involving multiple forward and backward evolutions, such as out-of-time-order correlation functions and entanglement entropies. In certain analytically tractable models, the evaluation of these quantities reduces to an effective theory of an “entanglement membrane” by averaging over random local unitaries defining the dynamical evolution. We show here how to make sense of this membrane in more realistic models without randomness. Our approach relies on introducing effective degrees of freedom that pairs the forward and backward trajectories in spacetime, which allows us to carry over the scaling pictures from random unitary circuits to non-random models. We show that a consistent line tension may be defined for the entanglement membrane. And we provide an efficient numerical algorithm to evaluate it in some translationally invariant Floquet spin chains studied in the literature.
Host: Meng Cheng (m.cheng@yale.edu)
Please contact Taylor Dunnigan (taylor.dunnigan@yale.edu) for zoom information.